OSX SkyFighters 1945 Mission Builder
The Mission Builder is a powerful, yet tedious, tool for creating custom missions for OSX SkyFighters 1945 (and 1918). For SkyFighters 1918 the Mission Builder is essentially identical, the only differences being the types of items and locales that can be selected. Rather than starting up a separate program, you access the Mission Builder from inside of the SkyFighters program. Start up SkyFighters, choose a pilot name, and select any mission. Once you're in the main game screen, one of the menu choices at the top of the screen will be "Mission Builder". Click on that, and you'll get the following menu choices: * Build Mission From Scratch... * Open Existing Mission... * (The choice to open the last mission you edited, if any) Based on the above, it seems reasonable to expect you could modify any existing mission by picking the second item. However, the Mission Builder lets mission creators "lock" a mission such that it can only be opened by the user who created it. Mission creators typically lock their creations for one of the following reasons: * Looking at the mission internals may help players figure out how to beat it. * They don't want players modifying the mission to make it easier to win. * For online play all players must have exactly the same version of the mission as the host. If not, players who attempt to join will be dropped (just as if they didn't have the mission file at all.) Locking the mission file helps avoid issues with multiple differing versions of the mission file being distributed (although this problem can still exist if the mission creator has release multiple versions of the same mission file, for instance to fix issues found after the initial release.) The Mission Builder has seven different "tabs" across the top. Each tab controls different aspects of the mission being edited. The bottom part of the Mission Builder displays the map of the "world" (location) of the mission. We'll cover the various aspects of the Mission Builder on the following pages. We'll cover them in the order you need to know about them, not the order things are presented within the builder. * OSX SkyFighters 1945 MB 1 - Select World tab *OSX SkyFighters 1945 MB 2 - Victory Conditions *OSX SkyFighters 1945 MB 3 - Mission Text *OSX SkyFighters 1945 MB 4 - Add Buildings & Vehicles *OSX SkyFighters 1945 MB 5 - Position Aircraft *OSX SkyFighters 1945 MB 6 - Misc *OSX SkyFighters 1945 MB 7 - QDS Known Issues With the 10.11.3 Mac OS update, the Mission Builder can crash on startup. The issue occurs when you attempt to open the Mission Builder for the first time since starting SF1945 using the "Open Existing Mission..." menu option. When the problem occurs, it crashes SF completely. If this happens, the workaround is to initially open the mission builder using the "Build Mission From Scratch..." menu option. Once the Mission Builder window opens, exit it without saving. Once you've done this, you can then open a mission file using the "Open Existing Mission..." menu option without crashing.